


bottled sunbeams in a jar

by wolframvonbielefeld (maknaeline)



Category: The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, M/M, Mild Novel Spoilers, POV Second Person, Spoilers for Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-25 23:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16207844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maknaeline/pseuds/wolframvonbielefeld
Summary: You are Lan Wangji, you are your father's son, and you are in love.Or: how Wangji looked at Wuxian once, and then never stopped looking.





	bottled sunbeams in a jar

**Author's Note:**

> I put this on [twitter](https://twitter.com/wangxianist/status/1048448660630003712) first, if anyone wants to take a peek! This is the corrected version.

You are fifteen and a boy made of sunbeams appears on the horizon. You have spent your best hours of your life inside and in seclusion, the model of cultivation. He forces his way inside your room like errant sunbeams, blinding your eye at all the wrong (the right) angles. You try your hand at calligraphy and you add two extra strokes, like hands entwined, staring down at 愛 on your rice paper ( _love, love, love,_ your heart and mind repeats), and wonder if it’s worth it starting all over again.

You provoke him without meaning to.

He hunts you like he hunts pheasants, with an unequalled ferocity and light-hearted laughter that you have not heard so long inside the Cloud Recesses that you have forgotten what it feels like.

He _draws_ you, peony in your hair like a fair maiden, and then he draws you in, and then he pushes you away. Or rather, you push him away, at swordpoint, his laughter ringing in your ears, so unaware of the tumult within you.

He gives you a rabbit. A rabbit? He gives you two rabbits. _Half a day I spent on them,_ he says, _and you don’t like them? I might as well eat them._

He gives you a basket of loquats and says, _Lan Zhan, you are so pretty, isn’t he so pretty? Lan Zhan, look at me, look at me, Lan Zhan, aren’t we friends? Lan Zhan, aren’t we?_

When he isn’t looking you take his efforts and hide them in the crook of your neck, underneath your trembling heavy sleeves like you hide the way your heart swells when you look at him. You are a Twin Jade of Lan. You are a jade casket, sealed off from worldly matters. He is the sun. He is the world.

You do not say anything.

(You never stop looking.)

 

***

 

You are sixteen and he invades your space like he never left, like you have not spent the last year trying to forget the lilt of his voice, the way the sun kisses him until you are jealous of the way it is allowed to drape itself over him like a lover would.

He drapes himself over the disciples from Yunmeng, over that foster brother of his who always looks somewhere between annoyed and fond at his proximity, and you curse their familiarity and your childish, unreasonable envy.

He has written the three thousand rules of your clan three times over, and you have memorized his dear face more intently than any of your texts in that month, staring at him over your books. You have dreamed of how he talks about the Lotus Pier, of holding hands with all the beautiful people there (him), and him eating lotus seeds. You have dreamed of plucking them out of his mouth, stealing his breath in the same instant. They are outrageous fantasies. You have wept, and asked for punishment while the Elders looked on baffled as to why you needed them. Your brother never disapproves, but his lips were pursed and his eyes were wet when he pulled you away from the ancestral hall after a whipping you thought could never be enough to atone.

He knows nothing of this, nothing of how you feel. It is evident in the way he smiles at you without a trace of disgust, without the expectation of a smile back. _He_ is not selfish, unlike you, who greedily commits his smiles to memory and consume them like water, like air you breathe.

His memory, however, has never been as keen. You have overheard him complain before, when he was still at the Cloud Recesses - _it’s not like I’m going to marry into the family!_ \- and blushed fiercely, footsteps speeding up as you moved away. He does not know.

You repeat this to yourself after he pulls your ribbon loose, after it sits on his unharmed hand like it is not the end of everything you have fought with yourself for. As if the eyes of the Elders on you are not horrified disappointment. Nothing can happen. You are safe. He will never know.

You say nothing.

(You try to stop looking, and fail.)

 

***

 

You are sixteen-and-a-half and you are caught in a cave with the one person you have forced yourself to forget, your leg aching. His wounds are brutal too, but he doesn’t seem to care.

 _Should I?_ he asks. _After all, she will remember me -_ and it is not about you, it has never been about you, but your rage almost blinds you in a way it never has before, in a way only he can harness. You shove him, and he looks heartbroken at you, before you break down as well.

It is all right. He will not remember the way you cried, the way your thin body shook as you thought about your home burning, about the distant but dearly beloved father who lay half dead hundreds of miles away. He will not understand the way you feel about thousands of years worth of ancient walls burning, and how difficult they will be to restore, and the talk of heirs that your brother and you will be forced to consider as soon as you turn of age.

He will not understand why your heart leaps into your throat when he risks his life, because you cannot hold him and say - _you are all I may have left in the world, and I cannot -_

The Xuanwu is in retrospect, a lesser monster than the one that takes over your heart when you think of the possibility of him being hurt, of him being gone. You shake him awake, uncaring of the strings that lie all around the cave, pouring purified water on his face with shaky hands to cleanse him of the resentful blood. You can hear your uncle’s disapproval, his dismissal of the unethical practices he has brought up in the past, and you are afraid.

Not of him, but for him. He wakes, and you check his eyes to see if they are the same stormy grey they always are. Your sigh of relief goes unnoticed.

 _Sing then, so I can stay awake,_ he tells you, when you demand he does not fall asleep.

You do not say anything in response. You pluck on the strings you conceal under your sleeves and tell him in notes he will never interpret exactly how you feel. No one has heard this except you, and now him. No one ever will.

You have, in retrospect, in all matters of life, never learned to look away.

 

***

 

You are seventeen and all the world seems dark because he is dead. The Sunshot Campaign has failed. You know this in your heart because the wretched man says his bones are gone, and your heart is dust. The bell next to your heart tolls as you jump up, the tinkling hardly notable over the roar of blood in your ears as you run your bleeding fingers over your broken _qin_ and channel all your anguish into one note that sears your spiritual reserves like your heart, slowly about to tip over into madness.

He appears, eerie like the green fire that flares up in all directions around you and his foster brother, who recognizes him even before you do. Perhaps it is your rose-tinted glass that makes you unable to understand how the man who reeks of malevolence, who sweeps in like a maelstrom and uses corpses to take down Wen clan members in far crueler ways than they have ever used, could ever be the sun.

Perhaps you have never been a very good Lan disciple, you think, but you are Lan Wangji, you are your father’s son, and you are in love. You know this because it only makes you miserable at how difficult it has become to protect him.

 _Wei Ying,_ you say, after all these years. _Your heart..._

But you are seventeen and you have never said anything, and you have no claim to his heart. He makes it explicitly clear. This time he is the one who draws the lines in the sand, like two children playing on the shore. _See? This is my side, and that is your side. I do not belong on that side, you do not belong on mine. You never have._

His brother steps in, staking his claim, and you know when your sandcastle breaks. You are seventeen and the Sunshot Campaign has taken down the sun with it. It is not the end of the world. It is the end of your sun and your world. You walk away, because you have always been a coward when it mattered most.

You do not hand over the bell that tinkles insistently next to your heart. It is the only thing you can keep of him, back when he still wanted you to keep looking.

You’re only seventeen, and you know you are your father’s son. You will never stop looking.

  
***  


[CODA]

 

You are thirty-five, and the notes of the _qin_ hang in the air, as if searching for someone. The water that rises from the spring comes to rest on the hand that rests on your knee comfortably.

Wei Wuxian laughs in delight, hair loose and falling over his half-bare shoulders, only barely covered by his night-robes, as he looks up at you coyly. “Are you summoning those spirits to search for me, Lan Zhan?”

Your answer is calm. “They wanted to know whether I found who I was looking for. They deserve answers.”

Your husband’s eyes widen as the moisture from the spring to coalesce all over him and drenching his hair and skin and long sleeves, like tiny dewdrops on a large flower.

“You - I might as well have taken a bath!” He glares at you now, rosebud lips in a pout, flustered red. “And - you found him, didn’t you? It’s not like you stopped looking.”

You lay your _qin_ aside, the dancing water falling and rippling in the spring in response, and gather this man made of collapsing stardust into your arms, and wonder why you feel so at peace when you keep the entire sun selfishly to yourself.

“No,” you say, petulant, almost in the tone he uses every day. “I didn’t.”

“Mm,” he says in response, content.

Neither of you stop laughing afterwards, falling into each other like shooting stars.

You are a bad disciple, perhaps, but a happier man.

**Author's Note:**

> Wangji's father, in the novel, canonically saves his mom from the wrath of the clan by marrying her and hiding her within the clan after she kills one of the members. It runs in the family, basically.
> 
> This would be longer, but that's venturing into severe novel plot spoilers, so this is for the donghua-only people. I did this in an hour completely unprompted because I was completely overwhelmed by the season finale ticking ALL my boxes. That's the best goddamn season finale of ANYTHING I've watched in years. 
> 
> If anyone likes this and wants to request a fic from me or just REALLY likes what I write, [check this link!](https://twitter.com/wangxianist/status/1044166593725571077) I always appreciate any help >.>


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